He furthered his education in Berlin, Paris, and London, where he made the acquaintance of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Herbert Spencer, and Vladimir Solovyov.

After 1878, he read lectures in law at the Imperial Moscow University, where he studied the Russian peasant commune and legal institutions of Caucasian highlanders.

In 1886, Kovalevsky was kicked out of the university and then settled in Western Europe, where he came to know all major sociologists and anthropologists of his day.

His cousin's widow, mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya, arranged for him a lecture program at the University of Stockholm.

He is portrayed as her lover and fiancé in the Soviet film "Sofia Kovalevskaya" (1985) and in "Too Much Happiness" (2009), a short story by Alice Munro published in the August 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine.

After the First Russian Revolution, Kovalevsky resumed his lectures in Russia (in the University of Saint Petersburg), became involved in politics, established a centrist party of democratic reforms (see Progressist Party), was elected into the first State Duma, and appointed into the State Council of the Russian Empire.

For him progress was "the constant expansion of the environment of peaceful coexistence from tribal unity through patriotism to cosmopolitanism".